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Saturday, 3 December 2011

An Empirical Model For Electronic Submissions To ConferencesPatrick Flandrin

Electronic submission to a conference is a process that is known to evolve nonlinearly in time, with a dramatic increase when approaching the deadline. A model has recently been proposed by Alfi et al. (Nature Physics, 2007) for such a process, and the question of its universality has been raised. This problem is revisited here from a data analysis and modeling point of view, on the basis of a larger data set. A new model is proposed that better describes the total evolution of the process (including saturation) and allows for a running prediction of the total number of submissions.

Call for papers: PLoSOneon "altmetrics: Tracking scholarly impact on the social Web"

Deadline: January 28th, 2012

The huge increase in scientific output is presenting scholars with a
deluge of data. There is growing concern that scholarly output may be
swamping traditional mechanisms for both pre-publication filtering (e.g.
peer review) and post-publication impact filtering (e.g. the Journal
Impact Factor).
Increasing scholarly use of Web 2.0 tools like CiteULike, Mendeley,
Twitter, and blogs presents an opportunity to create new filters.
Metrics based on a diverse set of social sources could yield broader,
richer, and timelier assessments of current and potential scholarly
impact. Realizing this, many authors have begun to call for
investigation of these metrics under the banner of “altmetrics.”
Specifically, altmetrics is the creation and study of new metrics based
on the Social Web for analyzing and informing scholarship.

Despite the growing speculation and early exploratory investigation
into the value of altmetrics, there remains little concrete, objective
research into the properties of these metrics: their validity, their
potential value and flaws, and their relationship to established
measures. Nor has there been any large umbrella to bring these multiple
approaches together.

Following on from a first successful workshop on altmetrics, this collection aims to provide a forum for the dissemination of innovative research on these metrics.

We seek high quality submissions that advance the understanding of
the efficacy of altmetrics, addressing research areas including:

Validated new metrics based on social media.

Tracking science communication on the Web.

Relation between traditional metrics and altmetrics including validation and correlation.

Wednesday, 9 November 2011

Special Issue of Scientometrics (2011) vol. 89: pages 347-463 of papers from the workshop ‘‘Modeling Science—Understanding, Forecasting and Communicating The Science System,’’ held in Amsterdam October 6–9, 2009.

The Internet has enabled profound changes in the way science is
performed, especially in scientific communications. Among the most
important of these changes is the possibility of new models for
pre-publication review, ranging from the current, relatively strict
peer-review model, to entirely unreviewed, instant self-publication.
Different models may affect scientific progress by altering both the
quality and quantity of papers available to the research community. To
test how models affect the community, I used a multi-agent simulation of
treatment selection and outcome in a patient population to examine how
various levels of pre-publication review might affect the rate of
scientific progress. I identified a “sweet spot” between the points of
very limited and very strict requirements for pre-publication review.
The model also produced a u-shaped curve where very limited review
requirement was slightly superior to a moderate level of requirement,
but not as large as the aforementioned sweet spot. This unexpected
phenomenon appears to result from the community taking longer to
discover the correct treatment with more strict pre-publication review.
In the parameter regimens I explored, both completely unreviewed and
very strictly reviewed scientific communication seems likely to hinder
scientific progress. Much more investigation is warranted. Multi-agent
simulations can help to shed light on complex questions of scientific
communication and exhibit interesting, unexpected behaviors.

Abstract:
Nobel Prizes are commonly seen to be among the most prestigious
achievements of our times. Based on mining several
million citations, we quantitatively analyze the
processes driving paradigm shifts in science. We find that
groundbreaking discoveries of Nobel Prize Laureates
and other famous scientists are not only
acknowledged by many citations of their landmark papers. Surprisingly,
they also boost the citation rates of their previous
publications. Given that innovations must
outcompete the rich-gets-richer effect for scientific citations, it
turns out that they can make their way only through
citation cascades. A quantitative analysis reveals
how and why they happen. Science appears to behave like a
self-organized critical system, in which citation cascades of all
sizes occur, from continuous scientific progress all
the way up to scientific revolutions, which change
the way we see our world. Measuring the “boosting
effect” of landmark papers, our analysis reveals how new ideas and new
players can make their way and finally triumph in a
world dominated by established paradigms. The
underlying “boost factor” is also useful to discover
scientific breakthroughs and talents much earlier than through
classical citation analysis, which by now has become a
widespread method to measure scientific excellence,
influencing scientific careers and the distribution
of research funds. Our findings reveal patterns of collective
social behavior, which are also interesting from an attention
economics perspective. Understanding the origin of
scientific authority may therefore ultimately help
to explain how social influence comes about and why the value of
goods depends so strongly on the attention they attract.

Tuesday, 1 November 2011

This special issue is a collection of position papers as to the important issues/approaches pertinent to the project of applying social simulation to the phenomenum of science. For more details see the first paper which is the editorial/introduction.

This is a blog (now) associated with the European Social Simulation Assocation SIG on "Simulating the Social Processes of Science". For all queries about the SIG, or items to post here please contact Bruce Edmonds "bruce at edmonds dot name". Thanks